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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Farnboro John" data-source="post: 3757068" data-attributes="member: 36432">What I read was the language of grouse-shooting propaganda. Lots of absurd riffing against the new tools that are closing the net on these murderous apologies for human beings: e.g. trying to claim that satellite tagging is responsible for raptor deaths instead of it pointing up the fact of routine estate purging of them (take a look at the map of the last locations of tagged eagles in the Monadhliath and you'll understand what I mean). This is, of course, unsupported assertion. I know this because, despite the fact that satellite-tagged birds are routinely relocated using tag information and that the tags are robust, all the tagged raptors that disappear stop transmitting and are not found. My deduction (not assumption) is that this is because the tags are smashed deliberately (as a mere fall from the sky wouldn't stop them) and the eagles' bodies are not produced to confirm his claim that the satellite tag harnesses cause death because the bodies are full of lead/have legs broken by gin traps/are full of alpha-chloralose or whatever is the carcass-lacing poison of choice these days.I saw no conservation-orientated words in his blog, only a lot of blah that anybody could write. I did see plenty of unbalanced hatred for anyone maintaining a close eye on raptor persecutors. He's just a grouse-shooting propagandist. Don't fall for it.Incidentally, how do you know the Osprey was fishing for trout? There will be more species of fish in the loch than trout and Ospreys are often seen carrying Pike and other species. Of course, anyone anxious to show that Ospreys target expensive game fish would focus on that..... :eek!:Recently I've read a few reports of days in the Angus glens by BF members, and curiously they seem unable to reproduce the success in seeing large raptors that you mention. Maybe they have been unlucky. I'm in Hampshire and only get to Scotland occasionally, so naturally I concentrate on spots I know will repay effort. Currently this does not include the Angus glens.While we're on, lets talk about the massacre of Mountain Hares by the same bunch of idiots, because someone has told them that Mountain Hares are implicated in grouse getting louping ill. What they haven't noted is that louping ill has been passing back and forth between hares and grouse forever, and until the moronity of Victorian values intervened, the normal cleaners-up of sick creatures, i.e. predators, kept it under control. With grouse moor levels of predator control (and this includes aspects carried out legally but still stupidly, i.e. destruction of Stoats, Weasels, Foxes etc) this natural check on illness is removed and suddenly moor managers are looking for a cure for something else they have caused with their utter inability to understand the word ecosystem. So they shoot as many Mountain Hares as they can and hope nobody will notice - or more likely don't care if anybody notices.When taxed with this latest stupid massacre the shooters say they don't recognise the figures. I assume this is because they are larger than can be counted on fingers. Even with my short visits to Scotland I can recognise that vast numbers of Mountain Hares have been suddenly and dramatically eliminated from places where they have been common for years and years and years.It's quite simple. Grouse moor managers shouldn't be put in charge of a box of lego, let alone upland ecosystems. Your blogger is backing them. Open your eyes.John</blockquote>

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